NHS Review: Criminal Offences For Neglect

NHS staff should be prosecuted for wilful neglect or mistreatment of patients, according to a major review of the health service.

Professor Don Berwick, a world expert on patient safety, also recommended new criminal offences for healthcare organisations that withhold information.

But he stressed the offences should only be used in a "very small number of cases" and that unintended errors should not be criminalised.

His report failed to call for a statutory duty forcing health workers to tell patients when their care goes wrong or for centrally-set minimum staff levels.

It said "achieving a vastly safer NHS will depend far more on major cultural change than on a new regulatory regime".

The expert, who was health adviser to Barack Obama, was asked to investigate NHS patient safety by David Cameron in the wake of the Mid-Staffs hospital scandal.

He told Sky News that the main thrust of his recommendations was for a "learning NHS" where hospitals know about mistakes elsewhere and can avoid repeating them.

Hundreds of patients were routinely neglected at Stafford Hospital

He backed calls for a review of staffing ratios so that wards are always properly manned but insisted a single number fixed by law would not work.

Instead, his report calls for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) to devise a formula NHS leaders would use to check they have the right number of staff.

"We think that's a lot smarter than a simple statutory number that would not be responsive to a local context," he said.

Earlier on Sky News, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: "A targets culture where there are lots of things imposed from the centre can be very counter-productive."

He later added: "The report makes clear that the NHS could lead the world in patient safety.

"Nothing less is good enough for the patients and families who rely on it and this Government will back our hard-working NHS staff to make this a reality."

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said: "All the experts are now telling the Government to get a grip on staffing levels. The time for excuses is over.

"While ministers dragged their feet, over 800 nursing jobs were lost last month alone - now totalling almost 5,000 since the election.

"David Cameron must now urgently intervene to ensure safe staffing levels in our hospitals. These dangerous cuts to nursing posts prove you can't trust the Tories with the NHS."

The Government will consider the report and the Francis Inquiry's conclusions about Mid-Staffs before responding in full in the autumn.

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

NHS Review: Criminal Offences For Neglect

Dengan url

http://serverkecil.blogspot.com/2013/08/nhs-review-criminal-offences-for-neglect.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

NHS Review: Criminal Offences For Neglect

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

NHS Review: Criminal Offences For Neglect

sebagai sumbernya